How to Check Website Reliability With User Reviews
In a world where cyber crime continues to escalate as the world becomes increasingly dependent on digital technology, it can be hard to know whether a previously unvisited website is safe to browse or not.
It makes sense to be cautious online – there were 5.8 million incidences of cybercrime in the United Kingdom alone last year, as the below graphic from The Guardian shows.
While some scams might seem obvious, such as that email you get promising a million dollars from an African prince if you reveal your bank details, many websites deploy devious tricks such as phishing that are harder to detect and easier to fall victim to.
User Reviews
There are numerous ways to check whether a site is safe to browse or not – some of them display a safety rating, based on their own assessment of how trustworthy a website is. Google’s Safe Browsing system, as in the example below, uses its own software to determine whether a website is dangerous.
An alternative and arguably better way to know whether a website is safe or not is to check the user reports. If many people are upset about something that’s happened to them on a website or they’ve noticed something suspicious, they’ll often report it.
MyWOT / WOT Web of Trust
A prime example of the usefulness of user reviews is the MyWOT or Web of Trust website. Here, millions of websites across the internet are assigned a safety rating not based on any complex algorithms, but on the feedback that users give each site. This makes it great for gauging whether the site you’re visiting is reliable and finding out further information about it.
If enough people have had issues with a given website, they will let the MyWOT tool know about it, and by extension, you’ll know too.
As you can see from the above images, Web of Trust doesn’t just display the scores, it also shows the user reviews, which can be really helpful in understanding exactly why a website is not safe or is safe to visit.
Obviously in this case, with such low scores, you’d never visit the site. But if it was borderline, checking the user reviews would help you make a more informed decision and ensure safer web browsing. There is also a nifty community forum on Web of Trust for people to get really involved in discussing website safety.
Safer Browsing
So, next time you are concerned whether a website is reliable, visit somewhere like Web of Trust or AVG to read the user reviews instead of simply doing nothing at all or just checking its rating. Delve into the reports to find out the reasons people are rating a website poorly. Smarter browsing takes more time but it also means safer browsing.
